It’s easy to see Antonin Dvořák as a symphonist and a composer of absolute music in the Johannes Brahms camp. It’s easy to see his contemporary Czech composer Bedrich Smetana as a champion of Czech culture, allied with Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. On this view, Smetana represents Czech nationalism and Dvořák internationalism. In that case, why did Dvořák write program music, Lisztian tone poems?

His last five symphonic works are all tone poems. His turning to program music irritated the critics who had supported him as a symphonist and composer of absolute music. The only thing more unwelcome would have been if Brahms himself had started writing Wagnerian operas.

But being a friend of Brahms and writing music that the Brahms school approved of hardly required Dvořák to dislike Wagner’s music. He first heard Richard Wagner’s music in 1857 and later commented that he had “unbounded admiration” for it. His performance on an orchestral program under Wagner’s direction was an early highlight of his career.

In fact, he soon realized that he had tried too hard to follow Wagner’s example, so much so that he completely rewrote his early Wagnerian-style opera The King and the Charcoal Burner in a completely new style.

In 1874, as a composer living in genteel poverty and little known outside of Prague, Dvořák applied for and won the Austrian State Prize for composition. The committee, including Brahms, was impressed by both the mastery of his compositions and the sheer number (15) he submitted, including two symphonies.

Dvořák, a Czech composer

Austrian critics who supported Brahms also supported Dvořák, but he was Czech and not German. In their eyes, that made him a second-class musician. That attitude may have influenced his “defection.”

In the late 1870s, Dvořák consciously used Slavic themes in his music. His String Quartet in D Major uses for a theme a patriotic song banned by the Austrian government.

Conductor Hans Richter commissioned a symphony from Dvořák and intended to premiere it with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1880. The orchestra balked. They had played a Dvořák piece the previous season and saw no point in performing music by the same Czech composer two years in a row.

At that time, Dvořák was less highly regarded in German-speaking countries than anywhere else in the world that heard his music. Part of his international esteem came specifically from the unique rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic traits that Dvořák had distilled from Czech folk music.

Dvořák composed a set of three concert overtures in 1891: In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello. They were his first foray into program music. They raised no critical eyebrows, however. Mendelssohn had written several such overtures without turning away from classical ideals.

When he came to the US, Dvořák encouraged development of an American national style. The best-known American composers of the time, those gathered around John Knowles Paine in Boston, slavishly followed German models.

Dvořák prized the folk music of immigrants, Creoles, Indians, and Negroes, people marginalized by respectable society. Perhaps his kinship with this music resulted in part from his own experiences as being regarded as culturally inferior. And perhaps his advocacy of this movement helped spur him to become more of a nationalist in his own compositions once he returned home.

Dvořák’s turn to program music, tone poems

Dvořák returned from the US in 1895 and composed his last two string quartets. He composed no more abstract music for the rest of his life. He reread a beloved collection of ballads, called The Garland, by the nationalistic poet Karel Jaromir Erben. It reminded him that for all his international reputation, he was Czech at heart.

So for the first time in his life, he turned his attention to symphonic tone poems. In 1896, he wrote four of them based on Erben’s poetry: The Water Goblin, Op. 107; The Noon Witch, Op. 108; The Golden Spinning Wheel, Op. 109; The Wild Dove, Op. 110. In 1897, he added A Hero’s Song, Op. 111, often considered to be autobiographical.

He took the tone poems of Franz Lizst as his model—an almost unforgivable offense to champions of all of his output up to that time. He assigned a theme to each character in each drama and subjected it to Lisztian thematic transformation.

Erben’s poetry shaped not only the form of each of the first four tone poems, but also the structure of his melodic lines. Dvořák even wrote some of Erben’s text into the score. At these points, the orchestral melodies amount to a setting of the texts, even though he had no intention for anyone to sing them.

After these five tone poems, Dvořák turned away from orchestral music entirely. He wrote only operas on Czech stories until his death in 1904.

The Water Goblin

A young girl decides to wash clothes in a lake where the Water Goblin lives, despite her mother’s warning. Just as she dips the first garment in the water, the bridge she stands on collapses.

The Water Goblin captures her and forcefully marries her. She bears him a son, whom she loves, but after a year, begs to be able to visit her mother. The Goblin makes her promise not to take the baby with her and return to the lake before the Vespers bell.

The mother, however, refuses to let her return to the lake. The enraged Goblin calls up a storm. When mother and daughter come out of the house, they find the child’s beheaded corpse.

The Noon Witch

The Noonday Witch gets her name from the fact that she is active only one hour per day, just before noon.

A young mother, exasperated with her misbehaving son, threatens to call the Witch to come and get him. That threat is all the Witch needs to try to steal the boy. The mother fights valiantly and, as soon as the noon bell rings, the Witch leaves.

The father comes home later that day and finds his wife and son unconscious. He manages to revive her, but she had so closely clutched her son that she had smothered him to death.

The Golden Spinning Wheel

A young king meets a peasant girl, Dornička, at her spinning wheel and falls in love with her. When he returns to marry her, her stepmother murders and dismembers her and sends her own daughter to marry the king. The stepsister keeps the body parts.

As the king goes off to war, an old man discovers Dornička’s body and decides to bring her back to life. He persuades the queen to exchange the body parts for parts of a golden spinning wheel.

The king returns in triumph, and the spinning wheel portrays a song that describes the crimes of his queen and her mother. The king races to the forest to find his rightful bride and throws the murderers to the wolves. The piece ends with their joyful wedding.

The Wild Dove

A woman has secretly poisoned her husband. Her theme is a funeral march as she accompanies his body to the cemetery, feigning grief.

She remarries in a flamboyant wedding, but the daily cooing of a dove over her first husband’s grave reminds her of her crime and drives her insane. She drowns herself, and the dove gets the last word.

A Hero’s Song

Dvořák provided some information about A Hero’s Song in a letter to Viennese critic Robert Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld wrote the program notes for the Viennese premiere of the piece.

Dvořák wrote that the piece represented a hero’s struggle through various trials until he attains victory. He further specified that the hero was not a military figure, but an artist, a hero of the spirit.

Beethoven, of course, titled his Third Symphony “heroic,” and a Czech critic wrote that Dvořák had provided a Czech Eroica. Many critics of the time assumed that Beethoven’s work was autobiographical, and that any artist’s work was necessarily based on their own experience.

The letter has some hints that Dvořák might have thought of the piece autobiographically. It also has some hints that he didn’t consider it either strictly program music or absolute music.

Austrian critical reception of Dvořák’s tone poems

Pro-Brahms critics

Eduard Hanslick served on the committee that awarded Dvořák two Austrian state stipends for artists. He championed Dvořák’s compositions, along with Brahms’, for years afterward. Hanslick disapproved of program music and favored music more in the tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

He also considered German musicians the pinnacle of musical achievement. Dvořák was not German but Czech. Hanslick frequently described his music as natural, innocent, even primitive. He could not conceive of putting a provincial composer on par with Germans such as Brahms.

He greeted Dvořák’s first tone poem, The Water Goblin, with hostility.

I fear that with this partially worked out program music, Dvořák has strayed onto stony ground, and will end up in the same place as Richard Strauss. But I really would not like to mention Dvořák on the same page as Strauss since unlike the latter, Dvořák is a true musician who has proven a thousand times already that he has no need for a program and a description to enchant us with the power of his pure, absolute music. But after The Water Goblin, perhaps a quiet, friendly warning would not go amiss.

When it came to A Hero’s Song, Hanslick preferred it to the first four tone poems. That’s largely because it could stand on its own without a program. Beethoven, after all, had Napoleon in mind when he composed the Eroica symphony, but he didn’t make up some kind of story to base the music on. And, implicitly, A Hero’s Song is less Czech than its predecessors.

The like-minded Max Kalbeck even wondered if Dvořák’s newfound interest in program music would lead to musical bankruptcy.

Pro-Liszt critics

Meanwhile, Viennese critics who favored Liszt over Brahms and tone poems over symphonies compared Dvořák’s efforts unfavorably with Richard Strauss. Strauss, after all, always chose interesting poetic material for his works. Dvořák based his first four on Erban’s grotesque Czech legends.

Like Hanslick, these critics considered Dvořák’s ethnicity as inferior to good Germans. What’s more, Erban’s stories all centered on women. Good program music, they thought, ought to be based on more masculine themes. A Hero’s Songwas as least masculine enough.

But Theodor Helm suggested that Dvořák’s music was nothing more than imitation Brahms. And how could it be about a Slavic bard? Helm did not recognize that there could be any such thing. He found the structure of the piece inorganic and disjointed in comparison to the more unified Brahms symphony that preceded it on the program.

This critical reminder of Dvořák’s second-class status as a Czech musician must have justified his turn to program music in his own mind. And perhaps influenced his abandonment of orchestral music for the rest of his life.

Sources:

Bohemian Rhapsodist: Antonín Dvořák’s Píseň bohatýrská and the Historiography of Czech Music / Christopher Campo-Bowen, 19th-Century Music (2016) 40 (2): 159–181
Chicago Symphony Orchestra program notes (The Golden Spinning Wheel, The Wild Dove) / Philip Huscher. December 2015
Dvořák: Biography / Lumen Learning
San Diego Symphony Orchestra program notes (Midday Witch) / Eric Bromberger. April  2016
Vodnik (The Water Goblin), op. 107 / Hungarian National Philharmonic